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Interventions with Children in Residential Care

Improving Residential Childcare Practice: Nurturance Care; Attachment, Separation and Loss; Narrative Therapy; Family Reunification; Life Story Work

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Treating Child Sexual Abuse in Family, Group and Clinical Settings

Abstract

In this section, our aim is to build knowledge and practice skills for working with children in residential care. We begin by highlighting important commitments to improving residential care and family-based alternatives that Caribbean governments have signed up to. We describe the current state of residential care services for children in the Caribbean, articulate what is meant by good quality care and provide practice examples which can be easily replicated. We acknowledge that residential child care in the Caribbean faces many challenges (Lim Ah Ken 2007; Sogren and Jones 2015), and we have been careful to ensure that the practices we describe can be implemented within current constraints while at the same time contribute to improving children’s quality of life. This is a book about child sexual abuse, and in this section we focus on the sexualised behaviours presented by Anton and Oriana, siblings living in a children’s home and our fourth case study. We look at the underlying factors that have contributed to their behaviour and how caregivers and therapists should respond. We then discuss what these overall factors signify for residential child-care practice in general and suggest a model of nurturance care that can be adopted with relative ease by residential facilities in the Caribbean.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) was established in 1973 and comprises all of the independent states and dependencies of the Caribbean, with the exception of Cuba. CARICOM’s objective is to promote regional integration in the Caribbean through economic cooperation, foreign policy co-ordination among independent member states, development of common services and co-operation in health, education, culture, communication and industrial relations.

  2. 2.

    ‘The OECS is a nine-member grouping comprising the States of Antigua and Barbuda, Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines. Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands are associate members of the OECS. [A Revised Treaty signed on June 18th, 2010 OECS] … establishes the OECS economic union, making possible the creation of a single financial and economic space within which goods, people and capital move freely, monetary and fiscal policies are harmonised and countries continue to adopt a common approach to trade, health, education and environment, as well as to the development of such critical sectors as agriculture, tourism and energy’.

    See more at http://www.oecs.org/about-the-oecs/who-we-are#sthash.Bg85L7oo.dpuf.

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Jones, A.D., Jemmott, E.T., Da Breao, H., Maharaj, P.E. (2016). Interventions with Children in Residential Care. In: Treating Child Sexual Abuse in Family, Group and Clinical Settings . Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37769-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37769-2_5

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